PROGRAM SEVEN:
CINEMATIC SPECTERS
Does the digital era signal the end of cinema or the critical ability to reflect
anew on the paramount importance of cinema to the twentieth century? Alternating
between pulsating loops, non-interactive QuickTime movies, archival reproduction
of cinematic history, and the appropriation of cinematic technique in performance
and metacommentary, these artworks situate the unstable relations of memory,
pleasure, and trauma against the backdrop of the history of cinema and the unavoidability
of its sight of the twentieth century. The artists’ incorporation of digital
advances in editing and virtual creation provides the history of cinema with
something of a new retrospective ellipsis and repetitive energy. The technical
ability to mine the edges of analogue structure, to enhance non-linear progression
and interactive entry, opens the cinematic experience to startling registers
of time, space, and identity previously veiled by the realistic sutures of analogical
cinema. By adding mechanisms of interactive enfolding and intersubjective touch
to cinema’s defensive procedures of voyeurism and projection, the spectral layers
of the digital permit the user to dwell in the unstable zones of representation
and its many cultural wounds. The virtual specters in this Program thus work
to foreground the psycho-social layerings of cinematic culture which can be
thought only as they will have been ghosted in the past, just as they can be
mourned only as they will have been illuminated virtually in the future.
Zoe BELOFF, Where Where There
There Where, 1998 (USA)
The Labyrinth Project (Nina MENKES,
Kristy KANG, Marsha KINDER), The Crazy, Bloody Female Center, 1998 (USA)
Lev MANOVICH, Little Movies,
1999 (USA)
Grace QUINTANILLA,
Vice Versa, 1998 (Mexico)
Charles TASHIRO, Courier,
1999 (USA)
Annette WEINTRAUB, Day of the
Dead, (USA)